You would think the official forums would be the place to go to get the straight dope, but nope. Is pretty common to come here with a question about mechanics and get an answer to the effect of "the devs already answered this on the discord". I don't know about the discord favoring antags but it does seem like MSE is more active in providing detailed info there.

Tldr:
Encouraging mic use fixes a lot of balancing issues, fixes the lack of conveyance helping with retention, it speeds up matches, raises the skill ceiling and is overall more engaging. I think that's worth the 10% chance that you may have to mute a fool every once in a while.


My belief is that boneheaded players that ruin matches aren't bad players they just don't know any better. Also, when I say on by default I don't mean always on. You could still turn it off and leave it off. Or mute specific players if they are being annoying.

Most if not all prominent multiplayer games now default to on. I just think that it's kind of dumb to have a game that requires coordination where no one is actually coordinating with each other. If the concern is that people will be toxic or whatever, I haven't found that to be very common. I've been in party chat with about 30 or so players I've met in game and out of all of them only one was a problem.

The fact is that if it defaults to off people are 90% likely to leave it off and that's how you get baby Hareks. Not being able to communicate is not only fostering bad habits, it's cutting out any high level strategic play. Which I would argue is the entire draw of completing objectives as a group.

Of course this game is going to feel imbalanced.  Instead of having two teams competing against each other you have one team competing against a random assortment of individuals. I see so many people complain about antags being OP without realizing that there are other ways to fight than "let's all just run at them and attack". Without mics how are you going to coordinate a strategy that actually accounts for the opponents strengths and weaknesses? How are you going to bait the antag into an ambush or funnel overwhelming opposition into a bottleneck or prioritize specific targets? More importantly how do you get the damn Lycus to stop blowing up the extractors and snaking the elites when he has a full stack?

Or let's just look at the most important aspect of a game; fun. When I play a match and I cannot communicate with my team I walk out pissed 8 out of 10 times. When on mic I normally play for 6 hours straight.

We need to rally around a consensus set of demands to make it easy on the devs to make it right. Here's my proposal based on what I want and the complaints  seeing from the community.

1. Separate PVP and PVE queues
2. Difficulty selection
3. Cut scene skip based on majority votes
4. Better lobby/team controls:
Pass party leader
Vote to kick
Host selection
Party chat in lobby
5. Voice chat on by default.

Is this acceptable?

Yeah on upside down you can't place it as antag. It's moreso a tactic to keep it away from the spider. The raiders can only pick it up from the terminal when it is burnt out. So if it is still in progress when the spider comes; they cannot take it away, whereas the antag can. But yeah I'll admit it could use some more testing.

As for the mines, last I checked antags can destroy the mines but not the miners. That may have been changed with a patch though. It's been a while since I've played.

Because of the nature of 4v1 antags literally cannot compete on equal footing. The rewards for antagging are only worthwhile if you absolutely dominate. You are incentivised to use exploits and dirty tricks in most situations. That's why people say that it is an invitation to trolling.

There are tons of games in which players compete against each other and no one says that the opponent is there just to ruin thier fun and waste thier time. The fact that this is a common impression of this game goes to show that there are foundational flaws here.

My guess is that most asymmetrical competitive games give the enemy player a different skill set and playstyle. But even those games tanked.

D. No antagonist, I would say A but that just makes the enemies too easy unless they have super low mmr. Most of the antags i face are toxic pieces of shit that abuse broken game mechanics. Excuse the language but they really piss me off.

Like push weapons and the konstantin's sphere on white noise and no res. Sigh

Right. I've been saying forever; make voice chat start on as default.  Nearly all modern online coop games these days defaults to voice chat on. They either don't know that's the case or know and are deliberately going against the grain.

If I could talk to new players I could coach them through and we'd all have a better time. Like "hey buddy, destroying the extractor is not how to win right now" on short fused. Or "FYI, herek is very vulnerable, but you can stalk to the ceiling to avoid danger."

This game requires coordination but instead everybody just runs around on thier own trying to guess what they should be doing. The biggest games today default to voice chat and nobody has complained about it. But people are constantly complaining that this game is too challenging. Whatever reason you have for continuing to do things this way, is simply not worth the mounds of turned off new prospects.

Indeed. My favorite is wait for them to climb or vault something and grapple them while they are in the animation. Works non sparking brutes every time.